If you’re at AWP this week, please stop by and say hi! We’re tables 433 and 434 at the bookfair, and we’ll be ready to fulfill all your Rumpus merchandise needs and answer any questions you may have about the site.

Write Together, Fight Together will include readings from: Jericho Brown, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Melissa Febos, Morgan Parker, and Sarah Sweeney, to be followed by music and dancing. Free admission, February 9, 2017, doors at 6:30 p.m., readings begin at 7 p.m.

Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies.

Kendrick Lamar’s debut album “Good Kid, M.A.D.D. City” contains the basic, essential elements of a novel: a protagonist faced with an antagonistic outer world, plot and its arc—from opening scene to crisis to climax on down to denouement, a narrative connected through scenes, and character development and expression through dialogue.

12,000 members of the literary community/industry gathered in LA for AWP last week.

Viet Thanh Nguyen considers the writer’s sometimes conflicting needs for audience, privacy, and the tribe. He writes of his own process preparing for a readership, “The constant reworking of sentence and narrative through writing short stories was my version of rubbing two sticks together.”

So the latest thing (why is there always a latest thing) is that a white man used a Chinese name to submit poems that were then chosen for Prairie Schooner and then included in Best American Poetry 2015 which of course has a lovely poem of yours in it too!

Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Sherwood Anderson and William and Faulkner. Henry James and Edith Warton. And now, X… and you!

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs just announced the establishment of a mentorship program starting in September. As stated on their community page, they are giving special consideration to applicants of backgrounds “typically underrepresented in the literary world” who are unaffiliated with MFA programs, but encourage everyone set on improving their craft to apply.

Have you been wondering what the point of the AWP conference might be to the 11,800 who attended this year? The Atlantic gives the ins, outs, and mishaps of the conference, along with tenuous or even doubtful optimism for the future of publishing:

I asked the editors of two-dozen journals to briefly describe their publications and what they look for vis-à-vis content (genre, aesthetics, etc.) and the response was universally this sentence: “We publish poetry, fiction, art, and creative nonfiction.

What exactly is the purpose of AWP? To meet new or online-only writer friends? To interact with your favorite authors? To advance your own writing career with networking maneuvers and information absorbed in panel discussions?

Essayist John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal co-wrote a book called The Lifespan of a Fact. I have read every review about the book since. It seems that Lifespan isn’t being reviewed, but instead a status quo is being swiftly and aggressively defended.

“So here it is: the trade secrets, the panels and moments we kept bringing back up over meals — really, everything that inspired us to discuss hotel arrangements for the 2013 AWP in Boston on our El ride home.”

Hello

Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). (more)